NGOs are playing a role that government and business cannot, so it would be foolish to allow them to die for lack of funding, argues Helmut Bertelsmann
Twenty-seven years ago, when I was at university, the world was inhabited by two kinds of creatures: Afrikaners, who supported the Nats, and English, who were liberal. Each had their sub-species: some Afrikaners were ‘verlig’ (the good guys) and some English were conservative (they worked for the ‘specials’).
Somewhere on the periphery were the people they were all arguing about: the blacks.
It was a lekker world, really. You could be one hell of a rebel (on Afrikaans or English campuses), but you would always be protected. Not in your wildest dreams would you doubt that a job was waiting for you after varsity; the system needed every qualified whitey it could find — never mind if you had shouted off your mouth a bit as a student: ‘reality’ would soon teach you better.
As, in fact, it did.
Most of the guys I was with in those years seem to have learnt the two basic lessons of life very quickly: money is the root of all survival, and, if you can’t beat them, make a deal with them. What happened to all those granite principles that these fellows declared they would die for, then?
It is not a fashionable question.
There are those of us who were stupid enough to carry that strange Sixties idealism into our adult lives, in one form or another. Some stuck to basically liberal ideals, others became more and more “progressive” or radical. Some of us ended up in what was, 10 years ago, the exciting and pulsating world of the NGOs (non-governmental organisations).
These were or are groups of people who did what the government would or could not do to help people in those areas where most whites had it good and most blacks had it bad: education, health, housing, adult literacy, basic nutrition and so on.
At one stage, we were the darlings of the corporate sector and the embassies, partly because of the activities of an American reverend named H Sullivan. Remember him? In those days, donations from big business and international trust funds were fairly easy to come by. Some of us did excellent work.
My organisation, for example, started with one little matric college in a disused furniture store 13 years ago. Today, we run seven secondary and teacher upgrading institutions. Our work reaches thousands of adult learners and un/underqualified teachers every year. By extension, about two million kids per year get a better education as a result of the work we do.
And now, suddenly, there is no more money. By some strange logic, our democratic election two years ago means we are not needed any more. As if, by the waving of some magic wand, our new government would get rid of all the woes that befall the poor, the un/undereducated, and the hungry in this country.
Surrounding the world of the NGOs there are many myths. One of these is that, because there are so many NGOs, there is “duplication”.
There is, in fact, virtually no duplication in the work that the many NGOs in the country do — and most certainly not after the attrition we’ve suffered since the smoothies that liked to appear on photographs with us 10 years ago have deserted us. Today even the most productive and inventive NGOs are about to die.
One of the reasons for this is that there are powerful people who glibly proclaim that NGOs which haven’t “demonstrated commitment to internal transformation” can’t really expect to be supported for work which, ultimately, should have a “transformative” effect instead of “merely perpetuating the power relationships of the past”.
In plain English, it means that NGOs that are still run by whites can forget about getting government contracts or RDP funds.
But the impossible task is this: find an able, preferably suitably qualified, black person who is prepared to run your organisation for the kind of salary that you can pay — without any of those lovely perks — who is not already in a top job in government or the corporate sector. In today’s South Africa, that calls for divine or mythical intervention.
Aha, our critics — who enjoy the benefits of accelerated wisdom — exclaim, but you should have “developed” and “trained” your own people in the years gone by, so that you could have promoted people from the ranks of the disadvantaged into your management positions.
Old hat. We did exactly that, for years. Those “developed disadvantaged” are now in the same places you find our most ardent critics — behind big desks in the offices of government, parastatals or international companies, nurtured by us, the forgotten NGOs, to enjoy “packages” our own executives can only dream of.
It’s exactly like leaving teaching and going into educational management — you get further and further removed from what it was all supposed to be about — the people in need.
When you take the time to return to that part of the real world, you realise that nothing has changed. Rural schools still do not have running water or electricity, many don’t have roofs, the teachers don’t know what to do because nobody has taken the time or money to “develop” them, and the kids drop out even before they have really started trying.
I don’t blame anyone, really — but, while the people suffer, while the NGOs are bursting with experience, expertise and creative imagination to alleviate at least some of that suffering, the fat cats lord it over us: “If you want partnerships (contracts) with us, forget about counting on your track record from the past.”
Worse, if track record (in our case: 14 000 successful ex-students, 6 000 of them teachers teaching 2-million kids per year) doesn’t count, how are you going to prevent the worst excesses of the Sullivan era? How are you going to prevent throwing money away at smooth talkers who claim “community support” — and not much else?
Worse still, you are more than happy to enter into cosy deals with all those guys whose pigheaded dedication to “separate development” or “plural democracy” 20, 30 years ago delayed liberation by decades — those types who recently decided that luxurious yuppiedom and lucrative “consultancies” were, after all, more attractive than dying for separate schools or exclusively pigmented municipalities.
Yet you are happy to abandon us, people who, admittedly, may not have risked detention and death, but who were prepared to make significant sacrifices to “deliver” RDP long before it became the nation’s most well-known acronym.
If I knew that our work would be continued by government — or anybody else, for that matter — if the remaining NGOs were to fade into oblivion, I would shed a tear or two for the dissolution of some wonderful teams of dedicated and creative people, but I would gladly accept the process as inevitable.
But that won’t happen. If we go, opportunities and life chances for thousands of people go as well. At the risk of sounding arrogant, it is simply a fact that no national or provincial government department is ready to take over from where we may be forced to leave off.
Today, even the strongest and biggest NGOs are about to die. If they disappear, and they will if something isn’t done immediately, the country — and a sizeable number of “the poorest of the poor” — will lose an RDP lifeline that will not be replaced.
Bold and imaginative intervention is needed now to save the NGOs that deserve to be saved — not for the sake of their survival as such, but for the sake of the people they serve; the very people whose new South Africa this was supposed to be.
Bertelsmann is director: educational services (schools), Promat Colleges